External powers can play a pivotal role in stopping—or abetting—genocide. For example, Western powers and the United Nations failed Rwandans by removing peacekeepers as the violence started. In other cases, foreign powers have actively supported genocidal regimes. These are the general conditions for genocide.
We know much about its specific causes, but still have far to go in preventing it. Ernesto Verdeja is associate professor of political science and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame. His research focuses on the causes of genocide and mass violence, and post-conflict justice, and reconciliation. Can history, politics, economics, legal systems, and culture all play a role in genocide? You might as well blame the weather.
Genocides and mass atrocities almost always target a specific ethnic, religious, or political group, but they are never spontaneous. They have to be taught to hate or fear. And, as the historian Benjamin Valentino has observed , someone —whether one individual or a small group—has to conclude that targeting members of a particular group is the only means capable of achieving a specific end.
Scholars have identified certain external factors—particularly war, impunity for past crimes, and regime fragility—that can influence or accelerate the decision to kill. Nor do perpetrators act in isolation: there are always plenty of ordinary men and women who—whether because of careerism, score settling, fear of retribution, or promise of financial gain—will run the camps, pack the gas chambers, and join the firing squads.
Charles J. From to , he served in the Obama Administration as senior advisor for atrocity prevention and response in the U. Department of Defense. Having spent most of my career in conflict zones, I try to avoid generalities in international relations. In my experience, applying lessons from one crisis to another can be a formula for disaster. There is, however, one factor common to genocide, and that is war. And, it was the U. Neither were in the country in In some countries where genocide has taken place, there is an ongoing history of ethnic or religious conflict—but not always.
As ambassador to Croatia during the war in the s, Serbs and Croats often told me that they never even knew the ethnicity or religious background of their neighbors.
On December 9, , the United Nations approved a written international agreement known as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Learn more about the serious, violent crimes that do not fall under the specific definition of genocide. This timeline notes the major conceptual and legal advances in the development of the term genocide. The ceremony at the US Capitol, featuring a candle-lighting and names reading, is happening now.
Join us right now to watch a live interview with a survivor, followed by a question-and-answer session. Hintjens, Helen M. The Journal of Modern African Studies 37 2 : Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Allen Lane. Enlightenment and Genocide, Contradictions of Modernity. Bruxelles: P. Mullen, Gary A. Philosophy Today The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide. London: Hurst and Company. Shaw, Martin. Journal of Genocide Research 9 3 : Staub, Ervin.
In The Genocide Studies Reader , eds. Totten and P. New York: Routledge. Stone, Dan. European Journal of Social Theory 7 1 : Before you download your free e-book, please consider donating to support open access publishing.
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Ongoing feedback is encouraged to improve it. While GESUQ represents our best attempt to reflect the interest and priorities of stakeholders and the interested public in genocide research, we recognize that the methods used in observational health research are changing rapidly, and the availability of different types of data for such research is expanding. For example, mobile health applications mHealth apps are becoming widely available for smartphones and wearable technologies.
While there is limited experience so far with these data sources in genocide research, we anticipate rapid growth in the near future. Additionally, health care providers in for instance Israel offer good registry data on more outcomes than government data that can be linked to Holocaust exposure without sample selection. The nature of genocide poses some obvious limitations on the conduct of associated research. However, the issues we have discussed in developing this instrument will be equally applicable in many situations involving large scale killings that are not subsequently labelled as genocide.
Second, it will continue to be extremely difficult to collect data in real time and any attempt to do so would face a myriad of methodological and ethical challenges, as was apparent in studies seeking to quantify the death toll in post-invasion Iraq. Consideration of these issues goes beyond the scope of this paper.
We have created GESUQ in the form of a checklist, trying to take account of and learn from existing guidelines. While we anticipate that GESUQ will change as research methods evolve, these guidelines should encourage better reporting of research over the coming years. With implementation by authors, journal editors, and peer reviewers, we anticipate that GESUQ will improve transparency, reproducibility, and completeness of reporting of research on genocide and health and, especially, much-needed research on evidence-based interventions for genocide affected populations.
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